Spacecraft Sees Few Traces of a Tumultuous Creation

First glimpses of the heavens by a new spacecraft looking for evidence of the beginning of existence have revealed an almost too perfect universe, scientists said today.

Preliminary sweeps of the skies by the unmanned craft, the Cosmic Background Explorer, reveal evidence of an early universe devoid of disturbances and irregularities that could explain the origin of the galaxy clusters, expansive voids and other large structures common to space, researchers said.

In presentations at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, scientists said the COBE spacecraft, launched almost two months ago to look for evidence of the Big Bang, is working better than expected.

And early data appear to confirm the predictions of this leading theory of the origin of the universe, they said. The theory holds that all existence sprang from the explosion of a fist-sized ball of unknown, primordial material 15 billion years ago.

Many cosmologists, scientists who study the origin of the universe, had expected the spacecraft by now to have seen evidence of disturbances that occurred several hundred million years after the Big Bang that could have disrupted the smooth flow of the charged gases from the cataclysm. These disturbances or irregularities, in theory, would have caused some of the expanding plasma to condense and become the ''seeds'' for massive structures like the giant gas clouds, great strings of galaxies and huge empty areas now seen dotting the universe.

The craft, however, so far has not detected any such disturbances.

''We can see no deviation from a simple Big Bang theory,'' Dr. John Mather, the chief project scientist for COBE, said at a news briefing. ''But it's hard to understand that with all the large features we see in the universe, we have no evidence of their origin.''

Dr. Mather, of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where the COBE satellite was designed and built, said that in several months, the spacecraft should gather much more detailed data. At that point, he said, evidence of origins of current structures should be apparent, if it exists at all.

'It's Going to Be Small'

''We're getting pretty good evidence that there's nothing there, but it could be hiding in the background,'' Dr. Mather continued. ''Whatever it is, it's going to be small.''

Dr. George Smoot of the University of California at Berkeley, who also is working on the $400 million project, said scientists were still looking for a missing link between a smooth early universe and the many structures that began appearing relatively soon afterward. If later data from COBE find no such link, it may be necessary to re-examine some elements of the Big Bang theory, he said.

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''Using the forces we know now, you can't make the universe we now know,'' Dr. Smoot said.

COBE, which contains the most sensitive detectors ever flown on a space mission, is looking for ''fossil'' radiation generated from within minutes of creation until the time the first stars and galaxies formed.

The solar-powered spacecraft, orbiting 560 miles above the Earth, is to twice map the entire sky in the next year. NASA plans to operate the 16-foot-tall, 28-foot-span craft for two years. #3 Main Surveying Tools The craft contains three principal surveying instruments, including a device to distinguish faint microwave radiation from early times from that produced by the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy in which it resides. The other two examine different wavelengths of infrared light. To boost their sensitivity, the infrared instruments are cooled with liquid helium to within 2 degrees Celsius of absolute zero.

The Big Bang theory holds that after the initial explosion of the superhot ball that began it all, a process began that led to the creation of atoms within 500,000 years and the early formation of stars and galaxies 200 million years later.

After about 300,000 years from the event, the opaque plasma from the primary explosion turned into more transparent gas, a process that released microwave radiation scientists hope COBE will detect.

Bright and Dark Spots

Scientists are hoping to find bright spots and dark spots in relics of this radiation that could be evidence of disturbances in the smooth gas that later would be building blocks in the formation of other bodies, structures that make the universe complex and bumpy rather than smooth and uniform.

Dr. Michael G. Hauser, also of the Goddard center, said early COBE data look good for fulfulling another part of the satellite's mission, completely a multi-frequency infrared map of the nearby galactic sky. Background infrared radiation from the beginning of the universe is so faint that it is difficult to distinguish it from more intense radiation of the Earth's immediate neighborhood.

''We are off to a good search and now have by far the best data on the foreground radiation clutter of our own solar system and galaxy,'' Dr. Hauser said. Within three years, he said, project engineers should complete sky maps that allow astronomers to filter out nearby radiation from their readings so that the faint signals of fossil cosmic background radiation come through.

A SNAPSHOT OF THE EARLY UNIVERSE

New understanding of the origin of the universe and the early formation of matter is expected from studying measurements of radiation in space recorded by the Cosmic Background Explorer. Remnants of the Big Bang, the explosive origin of the Universe, exists in background microwave radiation. Measurements of infrared radiation are expected to provide new insights into how matter first evolved. Changes in density offer indications that clumping of matter occurred soon after the Big Bang, advancing the formation of large-scale structures like galaxies.

(Sources: Scientific American, The International Encyclopedia of Astronomy)

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A version of this article appears in print on January 14, 1990, on Page 1001022 of the National edition with the headline: Spacecraft Sees Few Traces of a Tumultuous Creation. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe